A Ugandan court has sentenced a former commander of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) to 40 years in prison following a historic war crimes trial.
Thomas Kwoyelo was found guilty of 44 charges, including murder, rape, kidnapping and plunder.
He denied all charges brought against him.
Kwoyelo is the first commander of the feared rebel group to be convicted by a Ugandan court.
The LRA, founded in the late 1980s, is accused of committing atrocities in Uganda and neighboring countries.
The trial against Kwoyelo took place in the city of Gulu in northern Uganda, the region that was terrorized by the LRA for more than twenty years.
A notorious incident was an attack on a camp for displaced civilians in Pagak in northern Uganda in 2004. Dozens of women and children were beaten to death with wooden clubs.
The International Crimes Division of the Ugandan Supreme Court decided not to impose the death penalty or life imprisonment on Kwoyelo because he was kidnapped by LRA fighters as a child and turned into a soldier.
The group was known to kidnap children and turn them into child soldiers or sex slaves.
Kwoyelo says he was 12 years old when he was kidnapped.
The court also said Kwoyelo had expressed remorse and was no longer a threat to society.
Joseph Kony founded the LRA in Uganda more than twenty years ago and claimed to be fighting to install a government based on the Ten Commandments of the Bible.
The group was infamous for cutting off people’s limbs. Hundreds of thousands of people were driven from their homes by the conflict.
The LRA initially operated mainly in northern Uganda, but then moved to the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Kwoyelo was arrested in 2009, and later to the Central African Republic.
The group has been largely exterminated. An international attempt to capture Kony failed and was later suspended after it was deemed he no longer posed a danger to Uganda.
Kwoyelo originally had 78 charges filed against him; he was acquitted of three murder charges and 31 other charges were dismissed.
The former commander will serve a total of 25 years in prison, having already spent 15 years in pre-trial detention.
His lawyers said they plan to appeal any conviction and the court has given them 14 days to do so.
The court will hear the case regarding reparations for Kwoyelo’s victims separately.
The International Criminal Court in the Netherlands sentenced another LRA commander, Dominic Ongwen, to 25 years in prison in 2021.
As in Kwoyelo’s case, Ongwen was spared a life sentence because he was taken and cared for as a child by rebels who murdered his parents.
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